White House Offers Stealth Campaign to Support Immigration Bill

The office where Obama aides are coordinating strategy on overhauling immigration laws.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The hide-out has no sign on the door, but inside Dirksen 201 is a spare suite of offices the White House has transformed into its covert immigration war room on Capitol Hill.

Strategically located down the hall from the Senate Judiciary Committee in one of the city’s massive Congressional office buildings, the work space normally reserved for the vice president is now the hub of a stealthy legislative operation run by President Obama’s staff. Their goal is to quietly secure passage of the first immigration overhaul in a quarter century.

“We are trying hard not to be heavy handed about what we are doing,” said Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and the president’s point person on immigration.

Six years ago President George W. Bush publicly sent cabinet secretaries to roam the Capitol building daily to try to woo Republican senators for a similar immigration bill. But this time, high-profile help from the White House is anathema to many Republicans who do not want to be seen by constituents as carrying out the will of Mr. Obama.

So while lawmakers from both parties are privately relying on the White House and its agencies to provide technical information to draft scores of amendments to the immigration bill, few Republicans are willing to admit it. Some are so eager to prove that the White House is not pulling the strings that their aides say the administration is not playing any role at all.

“President Obama’s concept of engaging Congress is giving a speech that nobody up here listens to,” said Alex Conant, a spokesman for Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, who is an important supporter of the immigration legislation. “If passing legislation is like making sausage, then this White House is like a bunch of vegetarians.”

As senators near a final tally on the 867-page bill before the July 4 holiday, immigration supporters acknowledge serious risks in Mr. Obama’s approach: leaving the public advocacy for a major piece of his legacy in the hands of others. If the bill fails to become law, Mr. Obama will be open to criticism from Hispanics that he did not put the weight of his office behind the legislation.

But Mr. Obama has made some careful public efforts, including a speech last week at the White House in which he strongly endorsed the legislation. On Tuesday while on Air Force One in Europe, he called a Democratic negotiator, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, to reinforce his opposition to part of a Republican amendment that would have what the administration views as unrealistically tough requirements for border security.

Inside Room 201, the administration has gathered a collection of its own Congressional lobbyists, policy specialists and experts from an alphabet soup of the agencies that will have to put the immigration legislation into effect if it passes. They all moved into the vice president’s offices on June 10, setting up laptop computers and thick binders filled with proposed amendments on an oval conference table.

“We have folks who know the Senate really well, who know the players, who have been through this before so they know exactly what Senate staff needs,” Ms. Muñoz said. “We are deeply, deeply engaged.”

The group is led by Ed Pagano, Mr. Obama’s chief liaison to the Senate and a former chief of staff to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He is joined by Felicia Escobar and Tyler Moran, senior advisers at the Domestic Policy Council, and Esther Olavarria, director for immigration reform for the National Security Council staff. Some days, Ms. Muñoz and Miguel Rodriguez, the president’s chief Congressional liaison, are there too.

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Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, en route to the Senate. Mr. Corker has been backing a border security amendment.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

On one day this week, those at the table included two representatives from the Justice Department, a homeland security official, a State Department official and someone from the Department of Labor. Throughout the day they pored through proposed amendments, offering suggestions to the staff of the senators who offered them and flagging problems that might arise.

At one point, Mr. Pagano, Ms. Escobar and the other White House advisers huddled for 45 minutes in the smaller of the two rooms with Mr. Leahy’s top aides. Working from spreadsheets, they discussed each of the 10 amendments that Mr. Leahy was likely to bring to the floor for a vote that day.

“When Republican amendments are filed and we are trying to decide, ‘Can we accept this? Can we accept this without some modifications?’ they are the ones who tell us, ‘This is quite doable,’ ” said one Democratic Senate leadership aide, who requested anonymity to talk about legislative strategy.

Passage of immigration legislation is critical to Mr. Obama’s legacy but could also help Republicans repair their image with Hispanics — a rare confluence of political interests that has stoked optimism among supporters that it will pass the Senate in the next several weeks.

Mr. Obama’s political advisers say they are confident he will get the credit he deserves if the bill passes later this summer, even as those on Mr. Bush’s old team say an in-your-face approach worked best for them. (Although that immigration bill ultimately failed.)

“There’s nothing like having the White House represented in the negotiations,” Carlos Gutierrez, Mr. Bush’s second commerce secretary and a top immigration adviser, said in an interview. “It saves time. It saves effort. It just makes things more agile, more transparent.”

Mr. Gutierrez and others on Mr. Bush’s team concede that the current situation is very different. In 2007 the Republican White House believed that loudly demonstrating Mr. Bush’s support for the immigration overhaul would be helpful to Republican senators who needed to explain their support back home. This year, Republicans would recoil at such a display from the Democratic president.

In the meantime, two Republican aides said emphatically that White House officials had not participated at all in the drafting of the bill by the bipartisan group of senators.

But White House and administration officials have been in frequent touch with Republican senators as the lawmakers have to come up with dozens of amendments on tighter border security and other parts of the bill they deem insufficient. White House officials declined to name them.

Mr. Pagano’s team is planning to remain in Dirksen 201 for as long as the immigration bill remains on the Senate floor — clandestine, but not completely invisible.

“People know where to find them,” a Democratic aide said. “It’s like going to the nurse’s office. They know where it is.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 21, 2013, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: White House Offers Stealth Campaign to Support Immigration Bill. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe